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Spoken: [before tune]ALAN JABBOUR: How do you do the "Jenny Put the Kettle On?"/HENRY REED: Oh well, oh well.[after tune]/HENRY REED: Mighty nigh the same./ALAN JABBOUR: Yeah, it is. It's very close./HENRY REED: Old George Will White would play that half the nigh

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Recording chronology: 122

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Related Tune(s): Old Molly Hare

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Duration: 28 seconds

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"Jenny Put the Kettle On" is an old favorite in the British Isles and America. American sets are usually entitled "Molly (or Polly) Put the Kettle On." An eighteenth-century Scottish version appears in Johnson, Scots Musical Museum (1853 edition), vol. 3, 512 (#496), entitled "Jenny's Bawbie." Similar sets are Davie's Caledonian Repository, p. 83; Stewart-Robertson, Athole Collection, p. 88; One Thousand Fiddle Tunes, p. 19 "Jenny's Baby-Reel." American sets include Gentleman's Amusement . . . for the Clarionet (ca. 1825), No. 3, p. 5 "Polly put the kettle on"; Ford, Traditional Music of America, p. 85 "Polly, Put the Kettle On"; O'Neill's Music of Ireland #1363 "Molly Put the Kettle On."Henry Reed conflated this performance of this tune with "Old Molly Hare," which he had just played previously, and was cut off abruptly; his second performance of it (AFS 13705b02) is fuller and more representative, and in it he makes a third strain by reproducing the high strain an octave lower. George Will White, whom he goes on to describe as playing this piece "half the night," was an African-American fiddler whom he knew in his younger days in Monroe County, West Virginia. According to Henry Reed, the only other piece Mr. White played was "Sally Ann," which Henry Reed performed next in this recording session.

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